Brain Worms: The Ugly Stepsister (Emilie Blichfeldt, 2025)

I'm back from vacation! And, once again, have too many things to announce.

Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #1 is out now, and people seem to like it. Issue #2 is coming on August 12.

The final issue of Dead Teenagers will be out on July 29. After that, you can pre-order the collected edition, due out October 6.

Speaking of collected editions: You can now pick up this handsome edition of Be Not Afraid, which I love. DILF is still available in both book and smell form.

I have a difficult relationship with my body. I suppose we all do. Ever since beginning my transition, I go through phases when the gap between what I feel like and what I look like feels impossible to bridge. I know what I think I’m putting across, or what I mean to be putting across, but then I catch a glimpse of myself in a photo, or in an unexpected reflection, and I just don’t know that person. They don’t look like me — not what I think I look like — and they don’t look good. 

I put photos of myself online, when I’m in this mood, hoping someone will tell me they see me in there. The number of likes (low, thanks for asking) always confirms the absolute worst things I can think about myself. I remind myself that this is foolish, that I’m not in high school, that even when I was in high school, I was too smart to put pictures of myself online in the hopes that strangers would rate them. I remind myself that I am loved, that I am with someone who finds me handsome, that appealing to a mass audience is not the point. I remind myself that I have never gotten more mentally healthy by trusting my self-concept to social media. I tell myself not to post any more pictures online, especially not when I’m feeling insecure. 

Then I have another bad day, and post another photo, and it begins again. 

The point here is not to make you feel sorry for me. It’s that the condition of being at war with one’s body — which, for me, is about gender, about whether or not I Really Look Like A Man — seems to afflict everyone, for one reason or another. If it’s not gender, it’s weight, and if it’s not weight, it’s age, and if it’s not age, it’s dick size, or height, or body hair, or teeth, or anything and everything else you can imagine. Two things I have learned, after a lifetime of getting close to other human beings: Nobody’s “happy” childhood was actually that happy, and no-one, no matter how hot they are, thinks they're hot. 

Traditionally, this is known as a “women’s” problem — and for good reason. In patriarchy, men have bodies, but women are their bodies; their social value depends almost entirely on how well they appeal to the straight male gaze. Still, if the rise of the looksmaxxers means anything, it’s that this seems to be an increasingly shared condition. Whole multi-billion dollar industries depend on identifying bodily “flaws” and convincing people they have them: If you don’t hate your body, you won’t pay to fix it, and someone’s beach house will have only six bedrooms instead of ten. 

I don’t have a solution for this. We could smash capitalism, and it would fix some stuff (okay, a lot of stuff) but people’s innate tendency to set up hierarchies of sexual worth, to hoard status and squabble with each other over meaningless social distinctions, means that we will probably never be rid of the tyranny of handsome and pretty. For the foreseeable future, every single person you know will have something they hate about their body — a hairy back, crooked teeth, wrinkles, fat, a small dick, a weird gender — without being able to fix it. 

You and I may not even notice this supposedly terrible flaw. Strangers usually don’t. They may have found a way to seem “proud” of it (I don’t want to look cis! There’s nothing wrong with looking trans! I say, while harboring visceral, gut-twisting envy for every trans man born with strong features and narrow hips) or a way to hide it (the strong-featured, narrow-hipped trans man steels himself to face the mirror, aware that, no matter what the world thinks, he’ll always see the old face beneath the new). Outside, in the world, some of us are beautiful. When we are alone with ourselves, we are always ugly.